New Classics Books

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'But the cloud never comes in that quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it.' When Margaret Hale is uprooted from Hampshire and moves to the industrial town of Milton in the North of England, her whole worl...

"Finnegans Wake" is the most bookish of all books. John Bishop has described it as 'the single most intentionally crafted literary artefact that our culture has produced'. In its original format, however, the book has been beset by numerous imperfections occasioned by the confusion of its seventeen-...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'The wolf thought to himself, "What a tender young creature! what a nice plump mouthful -- she will be better to eat than the old woman. I must act craftily, so as to catch both."' Collected by the German Grimm brot...

Kipling portrays school as the first stage of a much larger game, a pattern-maker for the experiences of life. Implied throughout the stories is the question 'What happened to these fifteen-year-old boys, and how did the lessons they learned at school apply to the world of warfare and imperial gove...

'I value fame almost as much as if I had been born a hero'. (Preface to The Lucky Chance). Aphra Behn (1640-89) achieved both fame and notoriety in her own time, enjoying considerable success for her plays and for her short novel Oroonoko, the story of a noble slave who loves a princess. Acclaimed ...

Queen Lucia was written by E.F Benson in 1920. It is the first book in a series of novels that feature hilarious incidents in the lives of upper-middle class people in the 1920s and '30s. The characters vie for social standing in an extremely snobby world. In the series the two main characters - sop...

Make way for Lucia is a series of novels written by E.F Benson. They feature hilarious incidents in the lives of upper-middle class people in the 1920s and '30s. The characters vie for social standing in an extremely snobby world. In the series the two main characters - sophisticated Lucia and frump...

Arthur Raffles is a prominent member of London society, and a national sporting hero. As a cricketer he regularly represents England in Test matches. He uses this as a chance to commit a number of burglaries, primarily stealing valuable jewelry from his hosts. In this he is assisted by his friend, t...

Mapp and Lucia was written by E.F Benson in 1931. It is part of a series of novels that feature hilarious incidents in the lives of upper-middle class people in the 1920s and '30s. The characters vie for social standing in an extremely snobby world. In the series the two main characters - sophistica...

Wealthy countryman Mr. Hardcastle arranges for his daughter Kate to meet Charles Marlow, the son of a wealthy Londoner, hoping the pair will marry. Unfortunately Marlow is nervous around upper-class women, yet the complete opposite around lower-class females. On his first acquaintance with Kate, the...

This is the story of the lifestyle of three lads-Alan, Ron, and Ken. They were all born and bred in a working class neighbourhood area of the Manchester and Salford dock lands during the hard times of the 1920s, '30s and the war years of the 1940s. From meeting in the infants class on their very fir...

This is the story of the lifestyle of three lads-Alan, Ron, and Ken. They were all born and bred in a working class neighbourhood area of the Manchester and Salford dock lands during the hard times of the 1920s, '30s and the war years of the 1940s. From meeting in the infants class on their very fir...

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Introduction by Nicholas Rance

Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 - June 1, 1968) was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. The story of how Keller's teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language,...

THOMAS HARDY'S TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES: A CRITICAL STUDY A detailed and incisive analysis of Thomas Hardy's classic 1891 novel, using the latest research in feminism, gay, lesbian and queer theory, and cultural studies. Illustrated (includes images from the magazine serializations of Tess). Biblio...

Young Georges Duroy, known to his friends as Bel-Ami, has been working as a clerk for six months. When he is offered a job as a journalist, he takes it, gradually giving in to the corruption around him to become one of the most successful men in Paris.

Young Georges Duroy, known to his friends as Bel-Ami, has been working as a clerk for six months. When he is offered a job as a journalist, he takes it, gradually giving in to the corruption around him to become one of the most successful men in Paris.

This is a BBC Radio full-cast dramatisation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel, starring Bryan Dick as Nick and Andrew Scott as Jay Gatsby. The greatest book on the fallibility of the American dream, "The Great Gatsby", a portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, is by far the...

Written at the end of Twain's career, Extracts from Adam's Diary was first published in 1897 and Extracts from Eve's Diary in 1905. Twain's Adam was based on himself while Eve was modelled afterhis wife Livy. It is fitting that these two essays be joined together in one package.

"This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, and it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous affair with Sarah Miles--a hate bred of a passion that ultimately lost o...

"The drumming of the guns continued, with bursts of great intensity. It was as though a gale streamed overhead, piling up great waves of sound, and hurrying them onwards to crash in surf on the enemy entrenchments. The windless air about them, by its very stillness, made that unearthly music more te...

"This is not a romance - I have too often faced the music of life to the tune of hardship to waste time in snivelling and gushing over fancies and dreams; neither is it a novel, but simply a yarn - a real yarn. Oh!" Written with all the high spirits of youth, My Brilliant Career is the unforgettable...

"He had never got within measurable distance of what he called life, at all...deep down in him, he knew, was an enormous residue of vitality...It was like a buried treasure, jealously kept for the event of his one day catching up with life: not the bare scramble for a living that here went by that n...

Fergus Hume's sensational novel The Mystery of a Hansom Cab is Australia's original blockbuster and international best-selling crime novel. First published in 1886, it was an overnight sensation, selling hundreds of thousands of copies around the world and being translated into eleven languages. Ove...

Set against the backdrop of colonial India - characterized by a brutal state, opportunistic, feudal landlords and ruthless capitalists - this novel is a grim account of the blind beggar Soordas' struggle against the acquisition of his ancestral land. Weaving together themes such as industrialization...

"Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" is a masterpiece of polished cynicism, in which poison, explosive clocks and finally murder forerun married bliss. Each of the eight stories here were published in the heyday of Wilde's career, between 1887 and 1891.

Short fiction was an immensely innovative art in the medieval Arab world, providing the perfect vehicle for transmitting dazzling images of life and experiences as early as pre-Islamic times. These works also speak to the urbanization of the Arab domain after Islam, mirroring the bustling life of th...

'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again ...' Working as a lady's companion, our heroine's outlook is bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose proposal takes her by surprise. She accepts but, whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to the br...

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)Set in the magical Wessex landscape so familiar from Thomas Hardy's early work, "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" is unique among his great novels for the intense feeling that he lavished upon his heroine, Tess, a pure woman betrayed by love. Hardy poured all of his profo...

The Restoration Court knows Lady Dona St Columb to be ripe for any folly, any outrage that will relieve the tedium of her days. But there is another, secret Dona who longs for a life of honest love - and sweetness, even if it is spiced with danger. Dona flees London for remote Navron, looking for pe...

Her mother's dying request obliges Mary Yellan to make a grim journey across bleak Cornish moorland to Jamaica Inn, the home of her Aunt Patience and her overbearing husband, Joss Merlyn. With the coachman's warning echoing in her mind and affected by the inn's brooding power, Mary is thwarted in he...

The daughter of an English merchant father and Chinese mother, Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954) was a wildly popular fiction writer in her time. Born in Montreal, Eaton lived in Jamaica and several places in the United States before settling in Alberta. Her books, many of them published under the Japanes...

An invaluable companion to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain's inimitable portrait of 'the great Father of Waters'. Part memoir, part travelogue, it expresses the full range of Twain's literary personality, and remains the most...

'We shall have no other course to pursue but to fulfil our promise. You will die at Eight in the Evening - The Four Just Men' Criminals and malefactors beware! There is no escape from the sword of justice wielded by The Four Just Men. Here are the complete adventures of Edgar Wallace's daring and in...

It is the general view at Eckleton school that there never was such a house of slackers as Kay's. Fenn, head of house and county cricketer, does his best to impose some discipline but is continually undermined by his house-master, the meddlesome and ineffectual Mr Kay. After the Summer Concert fiasc...

The narrator and protagonist of Dostoevsky's novel The Adolescent""(first published in English as A Raw Youth) is Arkady Dolgoruky, a na-ve 19-year-old boy bursting with ambition and opinions. The illegitimate son of a dissipated landowner, he is torn between his desire to expose his father's wrongd...

Lavished with praise at the time of its 1925 publication, Leonard Cline's phantasmagoric "God Head" is being republished so a new generation of readers can marvel at its dark magic. Cline's mesmerizing debut follows the journey of Paulus Kempf, a fugitive labor agitator who takes refuge with a colon...

First published in Warsaw in 1816, "Malvina, or the Heart's Intuition" has been largely - and unjustly - left out of the Polish literary canon. Ingeniously structured and garrulously related by a Tristram Shandy-esque narrator, Maria Wirtemberska's psychologically complex work is often considered Po...

Founded in 1846, Fredericksburg, Texas, was established by German noblemen who enticed thousands of their compatriots to flee their overcrowded homeland with the prospect of free land in a place that was portrayed as a new Garden of Eden. Few of the settlers, however, were prepared for the harsh rea...

Marguerite Gautier, the greatest beauty in Paris, had many lovers but never truly loveduntil she met Armand Duval. What happens to a cool, calculating beauty when she herself suffers the wound of love?